


floodgates

by Anonymous



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Introspection, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 06:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30034182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: On March 12th, Tommy writes a book to Puffy that simply reads "help me." And by God, does she try her best.or, a series of vignettes on Tommy's first few months in therapy.
Relationships: Cara | CaptainPuffy & TommyInnit
Comments: 12
Kudos: 178
Collections: Anonymous





	floodgates

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for implied/referenced abuse and suicidal thoughts, though nothing graphic. take care <3

The first session ends in disaster.

Not disaster in the literal aspect. Disaster in the sense that she has to stop Tommy close to five times, remind him to breathe, offer him a mug of tea to ground himself. Tommy inhales the scent of jasmine like it’s the only thing keeping him alive. Like it’s the only thing keeping him from floating away. 

He leaves her office after an hour, feeling as if he’s walking through molasses. His movements are stiff, sludgy. Tubbo looks, concerned, at him when he arrives in Snowchester and asks, “Tommy, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Tommy says, and ignores the way his eyes won’t focus on the ground in front of him.

He goes to his bedroom, collapses onto his bed. 

He doesn’t move until night falls.

-

The worst thing is that everyone around him has been through worse. 

Tubbo was there for independence, was there for Schlatt’s administration, was there for when Wilbur blew the entire thing to sky-high. Techno was there for the dark, closeted ravine of Pogtopia, was nearly executed by half the L’Manberg cabinet, was betrayed by Tommy. Even Ranboo has been through hell and back. So has Jack, and Niki, and Phil, and even Puffy herself has weary lines of stress rubbed into her forehead. And all of them are on their feet and functioning. All of them can get out of bed in the morning. None of them have to fight for every breath like it might be the last one they can take.

Tommy is the only one left behind. The only one unable to keep up. Has Dream really ruined him that much?

He mentions those thoughts to her one day. Puffy considers this. Her pen taps once, twice, three times against her notepad.

“Progress isn’t linear,” she says eventually, “And everyone responds in different ways to different things. Sometimes you struggle more, and sometimes you struggle less, and there’s nothing wrong with either way of responding.”

“Hm.”

“What do you think about that?”

Tommy thinks she’s lying. He already visits her office three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. There’s no reason for things to take this long.

“I guess,” he says.

“What do you really think?”

He thinks that he’s a failure and a disaster and closer to falling apart than he is to being put back together. He thinks he’s a stain on the SMP and something that should be erased. He thinks that he doesn’t deserve to take up any space at all. He thinks he would be better off gone. 

“I guess so,” he tries, “It’s true, even if I don’t believe it yet.” 

That response makes her smile. Tommy likes seeing her smile. It’s warm, kind. It makes him feel like how the cup of jasmine tea between his hands makes him feel. 

He resolves to make her smile more often. 

-

“Last session you said you weren’t ready to talk about Techno,” Puffy says, “Do you feel ready now?”

Tommy’s answer is immediate. “No.”

“Still want to talk about Tubbo again?”

Tubbo is always a safe bet. Tubbo is Tommy’s friend, he calms Tommy down. It’s safe to talk about him.

But recently, Puffy has been digging at those assumptions, prying deep into Tommy’s thoughts. Getting to the areas that hurt. Like when Tubbo exiled him. Or when he showed up in Logstedshire, or when Tommy told him that Tubbo meant nothing to him. 

He wants to talk about Tubbo, but he doesn’t.

But he doesn’t want to talk about Techno, let alone Wilbur, let alone Phil. And he hasn’t even spoken a word about Dream. Not yet. And he doesn’t know what else there is to talk about. 

“I feel tired,” he says instead.

“Tired or drained?”

That’s something that Puffy asks a lot. _Tired_ isn’t an emotion, she says. _Drained_ is. 

“I just want to sleep,” he says, “Do you think we could work on that?”

Puffy nods sympathetically. “You’ve been having nightmares again?” 

They’re not even nightmares; nightmares would imply that there’s something to wake up from. It's true that he has awful, terrible dreams where he’s back in the dark place, back in the void. Sometimes he blinks and there’s the sheen of netherite armor by the foot of his bed. Sometimes he’s taking damage tick after tick, and no food will stop it, so he watches himself die. Sometimes he’s sitting by his tent in Logstedshire, but it’s high tide and the sea turns into lava and consumes him whole. Sometimes he’s eating breakfast with Techno while the snow falls softly outside. 

And the nightmares bleed into the daytime. So he doesn’t take damage. He doesn’t take off his armor, not anymore. He doesn’t sleep at night and he doesn’t sleep during the day and he doesn’t eat enough and he doesn’t know what to do, because whenever he blinks he sees the black of the obsidian and the darkness of the void and he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he doesn’t move and doesn’t breathe and -

“Tommy,” Puffy says calmly, “Can you breathe for me? Like we practiced. Square breaths. In for four, hold for four, out for four, pause. Here, count in your head with me. In for four, right? One… two… three…”

Four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. 

“That’s better,” Puffy praises, and reaches out a hand like she wants to steady him, “Keep going, Tommy. Keep counting.” 

-

“You know,” Puffy says one day, tapping her pen once, twice, three times, looking at Tommy, “Whenever you talk about Tubbo, your eyes do this strange thing.”

“Hm?”

“They move really quickly, from side to side, like you’re doing it without realizing,” she continues, and mimics the movement with her pen, “It looks like a trauma response.”

A trauma response. To Tubbo?

Tommy doesn’t know what to say. She looks like she’s waiting for a response, but Tommy swallows instead. He can taste bile in the back of his throat.

“Oh,” he says, fighting for balance, “Should - should I keep talking about him?”

“Only if you want to.”

Tommy doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to be there at all. 

But he manages to find his voice, “Sometimes I think he really hates me. I’m so scared that he wishes I were still dead.” 

Puffy makes him leave that day with two books tucked under his arm, written to help survivors of trauma, and he doesn’t dare look at them until he’s safely back in his room in Snowchester.

Tubbo asks curiously, when Tommy emerges from their hyperspeed tunnel, “Ooh, what are you reading?”

Tommy tucks them closer to his side, mutters something that’ll get Tubbo off his chest, and hurries away. He can still hear Puffy saying _trauma response._

He sits there, reading the books late into the night. It makes him want to rip his hair out, claw into his own stomach and tear out whatever is eating away at him. He reads things about other people’s stories, which is the worst part - hearing what other people have gone through. His head is fuzzy and spinning. His eyes are burning and he squeezes them shut, crumples his face up. The book tumbles to the floor. 

He can’t do this. He can’t do this. He can’t do this.

He takes a deep breath.

Picks the book back up.

Turns the page.

-

“It feels like he’s still here,” Tommy says, and _he_ could be anyone. Could be Jack, could be Wilbur, could be Techno, could be Phil. But it’s not any of them. “It feels like he’s still with me.”

Puffy says, “That’s the thing that’s most difficult to come to terms with. Because abusers don’t die, do they? They make themselves immortal in their victims.”

“But Dream’s not even dead,” Tommy says, and realizes this is the first time he’s spoken his name in the safety of this office.

Puffy only nods, like she’s been waiting for him to say his name this whole time. 

“Oh,” Tommy says numbly. 

Puffy nods sadly again, sympathetically. Her smile is gone and her tone is matter-of-fact when she asks, “Do you feel ready to talk about him?”

His breath catches in his throat. _Is_ he ready? 

“I don’t know,” he says, so honest it hurts.

“That’s alright,” Puffy says, and smiles softly, “Whenever you’re ready, we can begin.”

-

The story comes out in fits and spurts, and Puffy sits there for all of it, non-judgmental, merely listening.

The first session where they talk about Dream is awful, because Tommy gets as far as describing the interior of the prison before a wave of overwhelming static washes over his mind and he realizes that he hasn’t talked for three minutes. Puffy’s gaze goes soft and she says, _that’s all right, Tommy, we don’t have to talk about this today._

But the floodgates have already been opened, and Tommy returns two days later determined to get it all out of his system, and without thinking, without feeling, he blurts out every detail he can remember, the smell of iron, how sometimes the air itself felt so thick that it was holding him back, the shifting mass of the lava creating patterns when he stared at it for too long, raw potatoes cooked before said lava, books upon books upon books full of ink, written by - written by -

“Tommy,” Puffy says calmly, “Remember your grounding exercises. Make sure you’re staying present.”

He says, a week later, “He’s taller than me.”

Puffy nods. “You felt small next to him.”

Tommy’s voice, shriveled up, “I can’t take him in a fight.”

Puffy only nods, understanding and patient. 

He manages, two sessions later, to say unsteadily, “He asked me what it felt like. Wanted to know every detail of it.”

“Every detail of what?”

“When I died,” Tommy says, “He asked what it was like.”

“Did you tell him?”

“I had no one else to talk to,” Tommy whispers brokenly, “I didn’t know what else to say.”

The pen taps once, twice, three times. 

“That sounds very difficult,” she says eventually. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“It was cold.” Tommy’s eyes are unfocused. “And - it was - it was so - it was - ”

He doesn’t say anything for the next thirty-two minutes and fifteen seconds, until Puffy sighs and says _that’s time for today. I’ll see you on Saturday_.

-

He’s never spoken about the afterlife in detail.

He doesn’t think he ever will.

-

Some things he keeps close to himself, things that he’ll never say out loud, won’t even think most of the time. Things like _Wilbur is my brother and my best friend and a madman and a traitor and a bastard,_ and things like _I should have run away with Tubbo, but I didn’t, and now I’ve lost him forever._ Or even things like _Techno was right, I’m unworthy of everything I have,_ and even worse, so low that Tommy leaves it buried beneath the entire world, the idea of what Dream said to him in exile: _no one cares about you._

Well. 

He lies.

He thinks about _that_ one all the time.

Thinks about it when he’s replanting his carrot patch, because that action is the only thing that gets him out of bed in the morning. Thinks about it when he washes his face in the bathroom, stares at his hollow, gaunt-eyed expression in the mirror. Thinks about it as his feet trudge through the thick frost in Snowchester. Thinks about it whenever he hears Tubbo’s voice, laughing giddily with Ranboo. Thinks about it when he passes the Nether portal that leads to Techno and Phil’s home. Thinks about it when he passes the hotel that no longer belongs to him, built with his sweat and blood. Thinks about the fact that the only thing in the world that might truly care about him is made of wires and automation, but does Sam Nook really care about him, or is that just what he’s been programmed to do? 

Do any of them care? None of them do. They don’t. Not even Puffy. 

Not even Puffy, when she offers him a selection of teas three times a week with a smile, when she taps her pen against her notepad three times, always three times, when she rearranges the pillows on the overstuffed sofa before he enters, the way her office always has the curtains open, sunlight spilling in, when she sits there and places a gentle hand on his shoulder and reminds him to _breathe, Tommy,_ and he does.

Not Puffy. Not Puffy. Not Puffy. 

Without meaning to, Tommy folds her into his heart, into the soft place that hurts whenever anyone gets too close. 

-

He thinks once about going back to the prison, and the first time the thought crosses his mind, it terrifies him enough that he spends a full two sessions talking about it with Puffy. Why he had thought that in the first place. What was behind it. What was driving him.

“You’re seeking closure,” Puffy says, patient and soft-spoken, “It’s natural that you want to find closure in order to move on, Tommy.”

Now that they’ve started talking about Dream, Tommy thinks about him so much more than he used to. It’s strange how much he thinks about him. Sometimes there are days where he goes completely fine, moving around without thinking much at all about the prison. But then there are weeks where every moment reminds him vividly of a moment with Dream, and it fills him with such roaring, surging _injustice_ \- that Dream ruined all of this for him. That he ruined beaches and being able to take damage normally and he ruined the Nether and he ruined the certain smell that birch forests have and he ruined explosions and he may not have ruined music discs, ender chests, Christmas trees, tents, but Tommy still thinks of Dream when he sees all those things. And then he gets his heavy, sinking sensation in his chest for the rest of the day. Sometimes he feels like he’s moving through syrup, like the world isn’t real at all. 

He has days where all he thinks about is dying. 

But he can’t die, because there’s no peace for him in death.

-

“He was nice to me,” Tommy says distantly. The memories are waiting behind a dark curtain, ready to come to the forefront of his mind. “We ate cake together by the beach.” 

“Are you able to understand that his niceness was a way to manipulate you?”

Tommy nods. He feels as if he’s not in control of his body anymore. 

“Are you able to recognize that what Dream did was wrong?” 

He feels like a shell of himself. Puffy’s smile isn’t here today. It’s vanished. Probably because of what he’s saying. 

“I think so,” he fights to get the words out, “I think - I remember he told me I was loud.”

Puffy’s eyes grow dark and troubled. 

“And annoying,” Tommy grits, and his hands start shaking so he sits on them in order to get them to stop, “And I was wrong, for hiding things from him. He wanted to bring peace to the server. I deserved it. So it was my fault.”

“Tommy,” Puffy says firmly, “You understand that - this sounds like the start of a relapse in your thinking. We’ve talked about this before, remember? We talked about these cognitive patterns.”

“But no one showed up to my party,” Tommy continues, his eyes burn, his stomach hurts, “I know that the invitations never got delivered. I know that. But no one showed up. And - and that was it for me. I think. Because I wanted to go. And the beach party was the last thing. It pushed me over the edge.”

“Over the edge as in…” Her smile is long gone. Tommy feels like he can barely remember what it looked like. Her tone is cold when she asks, “Oh - oh, Tommy - have you ever felt suicidal?” 

He can’t bring himself to meet her eyes when he nods once, jerkily. 

She presses her lips together. Nods and sits back.

“Are you still feeling that way?”

Mutely he shakes his head. 

It’s a lie. He wants to die, but he can’t. Because there’s nothing in death for him.

“If you do start feeling these thoughts again, will you tell me?” 

She’s not smiling. 

Tommy misses her smile.

He doesn’t know what to say or how to answer or what the truth is, but he does know what will bring her smile back. 

So he does what will make her smile again: he nods.

He does his best to ignore how the lie curls around him when he leaves, numb and hollow. 

**Author's Note:**

> recovery isn't linear, but it moves forward all the same. comments and kudos are appreciated <3


End file.
